Word to the Wise
Saturday, November 25, 2023 - Saturday in the 33th Week in Ordinary Time
[1 Macc 6:1-13 and Luke 20:27-40]"The children of this age marry and remarry; but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise. That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called 'Lord' the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; and is not not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive." [Luke]
The setting for this passage is during Jesus' final days in Jerusalem when he returns to the temple and teaches. His adversaries are determined to get rid of him. First, there was the trick question about paying taxes to Caesar, posed by the Pharisees and Herodians. Now the Sadducees come forward with one of their own. They did not believe in a resurrection from the dead because they did not see anything in the Torah (first five books of the Old Testament) to prove it. Those five books were the only scripture they accepted. So they pose the absurd situation of the woman married, one after the other, to seven brothers. At the final resurrection (which they denied), whose wife would the poor woman be, because she was married to all seven! Jesus answers their challenge on two levels.
The first level is the level of the impact of a final resurrection. Marriage has no relevance to heaven. Those who rise from the dead "are like angels." The second level is a refutation of the Sadducees' scriptural argument that there is no mention in the Torah of a final resurrection. Jesus says that God is a God of the living, and does not cease being God for us simply because we undergo human death. Moses, in Exodus 3:6, speaks of a God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob as if those three were still alive. God is God of the living. Human death is transformative and those found worthy at death become "like angels."
St. Paul's teaching in 1 Corinthians 15:35-58 reminds us that we are made to live forever and that death is not the end, but rather a transformative event in our life. Human "trick questions" do not change this reality. We have the example of Jesus' own resurrection as the basis for our hope and the reason for our living a life in accord with his teaching. AMEN